Maitre D’ of the year Mallory Wall Café Di Stasio St Kilda VIC

Wall is just one of those people in the right job, her understanding of service tempered by the quirky ,almost club-like atmosphere of the restaurant and the people who favour it, many of whom have become friends. They include artists, designers, architects and many of Melbourne society’s more colourful characters for whom pigeonholes present a way – too – confining characterization. For not only does Wall front one of the great Melbourne restaurants, as familiar with the kitchen’s oeuvre as she is with a special Brunello Di Montalcino , but she also conducts an orchestra of male waiters whose style, manner and – hopefully – charm you just know is the result of many, many hours spent studying the form in the great and humble restaurants of Italy over the past 17 years. Like the passion of an expatriate for an adopted country, so it is that one of the great Italian restaurants of Australia would be less were it not for an Irish Catholic girl from Mentone whose love of Italy infuses every nook and cranny of her adopted home , Café Di Stasio.

John Lethlean, Gourmet Traveller

Rinaldo Di StasioCafé Di Stasio–Award for Professional Excellence

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It is a truth not widely enough acknowledged that great restaurateurs create restaurants that are an expression of their own personalities. In Australia, there’s no better example of this than Ronnie Di Stasio , owner of Melbourne’s best Italian restaurant , Café Di Stasio.

For better and for worse, Ronnie lives and breathes his restaurant. Has done ever since he opened it , in then deeply unfashionable St Kilda in January 1988 . Nearly 20 years on, the two–hatted Café Di Stasio is as fresh, compelling and incomparable as ever.